The LuxSci FYI Blog

by Erik Kangas, PhD, CEO

Posts Tagged ‘bcc’

People have asked us if sending an email to someone via BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) is HIPAA-compliant. For example, a doctor’s office sending a newsletter to its patients via BCC. The presumption is that because when a message is sent via BCC, the recipient’s email address is not visible in the message that there is no way to identify the individual(s) to whom the message was sent and thus the messages do not contain any “personally identifiable health information” (ePHI) that is protected by HIPAA.

The short answer is “BCC is not good enough“. For the long answer, read on.

Long available with LuxSci’s standard email services, users of LuxSci’s High Volume Bulk Outbound Email service can also have copies of all sent messages automatically BCC’ed to an email address of their choice (at any service provider to whom receipt of these messages is acceptable).

Collection of copies of all sent email messages is crucial for anyone who needs to have all sent email archived for backup, auditing, or compliance reasons. If you are sending bulk email, transactional email, or marketing email in a healthcare context, HIPAA may apply and your messages all need to be archived. The mass emailing must also be done in a HIPAA-compliant manner, such as using the LuxSci Premium High Volume sending services.

BCC to me: This new preference causes the “BCC” field to be pre-filled with your email address when you send messages from WebMail making it easier to send copies of all outbound email messages to yourself. See this preference in your “Email Composition Preferences”.

Wrapping long lines: A new preference has been added to your Email Display and Email Listing Preferences. It allows long strings of non-space characters to be automatically broken in certain places so that these long lines can be wrapped. Without this preference, very long lines could force your browser window to be very wide and require you to scroll your window horizontally to see your full message content. By default, long strings of characters are now allowed to be broken after every 80 characters; you can adjust this in your preferences.